by Dan Orlowitz on December 4, 2008

Spore allows gamers to play God from micro to macro – and every step in between. It is comprised of five sections that take the player from the beginning of planetary life as a single-celled organism all the way to spreading civilization throughout the galaxy. In between, players guide their creature to sentience as it grows legs and walks onto land. The game then takes on the feel of an RTS as the player’s creature forms tribes and takes over the world – through peace or perhaps war.

Yet it is not really the gameplay that breaks new ground as each has been done in full-game format before. Where Spore succeeds is in combining the five “mini-games” into a streamlined experience that can be played by gamers of any level and comes with customization that has not been seen in gaming since pen and paper RPGing. Each level features several user-operated content generators – from deciding the look of your creature to generating your civilization’s national anthem.

More impressively is that because the creatures, buildings, and vehicles are all generated by code, they can be quickly sent to the EA-operated Sporepedia, an online database that stores most of the content generated by Spore players. Every time the player creates a new world, the game checks with Sporepedia and randomly downloads a variety of creatures for the player to interact with, ensuring that each player has a truly 100% unique experience. While many early creatures are ugly, and there are more than a fair share of Pokémon lookalikes and multi-phallused phalluses taking up space in the Sporepedia, many more of the creatures are haunting and strangely beautiful.

The GUI will be instantly familiar to anyone with experience playing The Sims, while the graphics and music set a proper tone for evolving a microcosm. Furthermore, because the game is largely based in code, graphic quality is scaleable so that even older machines can run the game while having it look pretty decent.

The phrase “sum of its parts” has never been more thoroughly applicable than with Spore. The individual stages, while all entertaining are certainly not full-bodied enough to constitute a complete gaming experience in and of themselves. Yet when combined, this is a beast of a game with scale and ambition to match.

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